Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Personhood
Jonathan Hand, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
A while ago, a friend told me how excited she was, when she got to college, in
first learning about ancient Greece. For her, the Greek polis seemed to embody a world
that had those very things which modern life lacked: a sense of purpose, and connection
to a larger whole. The difficulty of translating “polis” flags the issue. The usual
translation, “city-state,” attempts to capture the fact that political units around the size of
Santa Fe were sovereign countries, with their own armies and foreign policy: citizens
assembled to discuss, not property tax rates or zoning, but issues that bore on the city’s
presupposes the modern liberal distinction between “state” and “society.” Unlike the
quasi-autonomy domains such art, theatre, the economy, and religion have from politics
and each other in our world, in the ancient world these were all mutually reinforcing parts
of civic life. Socrates was accused of not believing in the city’s gods—but in his defense
he did not, as we would, argue that he had a “right” to his own opinions, that there was
some “private sphere,” such as religion, out of which the government should stay. The
fate of Socrates, however—as well as slavery and the status of women-- gave my friend’s
Hellenophilia a marked ambivalence. When pressed on these issues, she said that despite
showing up the fragmentation, alienation, and aimlessness of the modern world, the polis
was not a world to which we either could or even should want to return. We are all
“individuals” now.
has been a fundamental aspect of European civilization at least since 1754, when in his
Discourse on Inequality Rousseau distinguished the ancient “citizen” from the modern
“bourgeois,” to the detriment of the latter. Rousseau gave powerful voice to this
dissatisfaction, but he certainly did not “cause” it: it is an understandable human reaction,
resolve that ambivalence, and reconcile us to modernity, lies at the center of Hegel’s
thought. This project of reconciliation is most obvious in the presentation of the modern
“ethical world” in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, first published by Hegel in
1821 on the basis of his Berlin lectures, and expanded by editors after his death to include
additions culled from student lecture notes clarifying various points. However, a
1
concern about modernity as a problem, via a contrast with ancient Greece, runs through
all of Hegel’s work. As a recent biography by Terry Pinkard points out, even before
Hegel reached the age of 20, ancient Greece represented for him, as it did for many
Hegel’s word for the quality the Greek world had that is seemingly lacking in his,
and our, time: substantial. A full understanding of what Hegel means by substance is
well beyond the limits of this lecture: Hegel, in using the Latinate term substanz (as
opposed to a term with German roots), puts himself in relation to a tradition starting with
1
Citations from the Philosophy of Right are styled “PR” and are by section number in Elements of
the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. Nisbet and edited by Allen Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
U.P., 1991). For the Editorial Notes, I use page numbers.
2
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U.P., 2000), p. 32.
need not be adepts in the history of ontology to understand what Hegel is driving at with
the term in a political or human context. For example, Hegel says in PR §40 that a view
of right that divides the world into “things” and “persons” having “rights” to those
presuppose substantial relations, such as family and state, with those that refer to abstract
(I hope) than my relation to my contractor when I hire him to fix my roof, that lengthy
contract notwithstanding. Indeed that contract is required because there is nothing else
grounding, standing under, sub stance, my relation to my contractor. Our relation, Hegel
calls one of “abstract” personhood, because any two parties could make such a contract,
his remarks at the beginning of the chapter on Spirit, chapter VI, of the Phenomenology
of Spirit. By “Spirit,” Hegel refers to his claim that all consciousness, all mind, is social
and historical “all the way down”: there is never “mind” without its being Greek mind,
French mind, etc. The first 5 chapters of the Phenomenology are an extended reductio
argument where all other views of consciousness are shown to fail on their own terms.
Hegel begins chapter VI with a section on the Greek world, which he calls “True Spirit.”
In the introduction to the chapter, just prior to that section, he says (¶439) : 3
3
Citations to the Phenomenology (PhG) are by paragraph number in the translation of A.V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977). I have occasionally revised these using the bilingual version of the PhG
published on-line by Terry Pinkard in 2010, downloaded October 2014 from
http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html. Since Pinkard has subsequently
published the English part of the translation with Cambridge U.P., the site has been taken down, but as of
Athens makes Athenians, and Athenians make Athens. For Hegel, the “substantiality” of
the Greek ethical world was something the Greeks experienced immediately, i.e.
without reflection or the giving of reasons. Thus, Hegel claims in the Philosophy of
Right, §147, that to speak of the Greeks as having “faith” or “believing in” their gods
Faith and trust arise with the emergence of reflection, and they presuppose
representations and distinctions. For example, to believe in pagan religion and to
be a pagan are two different things.
The Greeks did not “believe in” paganism; they were pagans. A nice example of this
immediacy is the character Anytus in Plato’s Meno. When Socrates asks him to whom
one should go to become virtuous, Anytus responds irritably that any Athenian gentleman
would be better (92e) than those who make a living claiming to teach such things, i.e.
sophists. Anytus admits (92b) to never having met a sophist, but for Anytus, virtue is
what virtuous people do. That Anytus is one of Socrates’s accusers in the Apology only
underscores the fact that the well-brought up Athenian as such has no patience with those
For Hegel, “substance” and “immediacy” are hardly peculiar to the Greek world.
It’s the reverse: Greece is important because it is there that spirit experiences a decisive
crisis or division, a crisis evident in the fate of Socrates, who as “free infinite
personality,” as Hegel describes him, has no place in the Greek ethical world. Rather, for
World History, Hegel infamously begins with “the oriental world” (by which he means
China, India, and the Persian Empire) which “has as its inherent and distinctive principle
ethical world rests on the pillars of the Emperor’s absolute authority and the spirit of
family piety. The latter of course appears in many other places—it is what is defended
5
For Hegel, what was undeveloped in all pre-modern societies, and what modern
society has in spades, is “subjectivity.” Hegel traces the origins of modern subjectivity
calls in the Phenomenology the “unhappy consciousness” and which emerged in the
alienated subject of the Roman empire. However, it is only in modern times that
subjectivity comes into its own, as a secular and political principle. In an “Addition”
(p.13) to the preface to PR, Hegel describes his (and I think, our) situation:
The human being does not stop short at the existent, but claims to have within
himself the measure of what is right; he may be subjected to the necessity and
power of external authority, but never in the same way as to natural necessity, for
his inner self always tells him how things ought to be, and he finds within himself
the confirmation or repudiation of what is accepted as valid.
This claim is not made everywhere and always, but it might make it seem that modern
subjectivity is a mere “mentality,” the way we think now. Far from it. To be real, a part
of the modern European spirit, subjectivity has to be embodied, made objective, as it has
now become in the modern “state,” a political form which gives an unprecedented
4
Cited from the translation of J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956; first published 1899), p. 111.
5
Op. cit, pp. 120-1.
like a Socrates swatting off many and varied forms of sophist pests, Hegel spends much
of his argument, in PR, the Phenomenology, and other places cataloguing and combatting
all the various pathological or at least incomplete forms of subjectivity that are sprouting
in Europe like mushrooms after the rain. Thus, in the Preface to PR, Hegel gets in his
crosshairs one “Herr Fries,” “a leader of this superficial brand of so called philosophers,”
who claims that “truth consists in what wells up from each individual’s heart, emotion,
and enthusiasm in relation to ethical subjects, particularly to the state, government, and
the constitution.” Fries and his young enthusiasts, however, are just one flavor in the
division of PR, §140, Hegel goes through a series of modern variants of subjectivity to
show just where taking truth to be solely “in oneself” finally leads:
It is not the thing which is excellent, it is I who am master of both law and thing; I
merely play with them as my own caprice, and in this ironic consciousness in
which I let the highest of things perish, I merely enjoy myself. In this shape,
subjectivity is not only empty of all ethical content in the way of rights, duties,
and laws and is accordingly evil (evil, in fact of an inherently wholly universal
kind); in addition, its form is that of subjective emptiness, in that it knows itself as
this emptiness of all content and, in this knowledge knows itself as the absolute.
(PR §140, p. 182)
This concern about what we would call “nihilism,” and what Hegel calls “evil” and
“absolute sophistry” (§140, pp. 182-3), are definitive of Hegel’s entire philosophic
effort: to bring together substance and subject, or as we might say, subjectivity and
objectivity. As Hegel famously says in the Preface to the Phenomenology (¶ 17): “In my
on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”
between substance and subjectivity? To flesh this out, I shall focus on Hegel’s treatment
its roots in Roman law, but which only comes into its own in modern times. First, I shall
the first section of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right.” While initially the latter
appears far more positive than the former, the differences are traceable to different
manners of treatment, rather than different evaluations. Secondly, I shall look at the role
personhood plays in Hegel’s presentation of the concrete forms of modern society in the
third, and longest, section of the Philosophy of Right, “Ethical Life.” Hegel confines the
applicability of personhood to only one sphere of our common or ethical world, namely
“civil society,” by which Hegel primarily means the economy, the world of property and
contracts. For Hegel, “civil society” is, crucially, bounded (below and above, as it were)
by two other domains of our common existence, the family and the state, which are
than, personhood. I shall conclude with a few thoughts about how successful Hegel’s
entitled “Legal Status,” Rechtszustand, which comes at the end of the first major section
Geist, die Sittlichkeit). This first section is largely devoted to ancient Greece because, as
I have said, the polis is Hegel’s model for what Spirit is, namely a social world whose
parts form a whole, and to which the individual has a substantial relation. At the same
time, as the motion of World History shows, Spirit is not static. “Legal Status” (VI.A. c.)
marks the transition from the world of the Greek polis to that of Roman law, from
simply due to the contingent facts of Rome’s military conquest of Greece, or of the scale
of Empire as opposed to that of the Greek city. Rather, the Greek world’s passing is due
to, as it were, natural causes. There is an internal tension in the Greek spirit, a tension
whose playing out leads to its evisceration—a crisis to which, in Hegel’s treatment, the
in the Phenomenology.
As our seniors know, the center of Hegel’s treatment of the Ethical World in the
Phenomenology is his discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone. I only have time for a very
superficial sketch here. Hegel begins (¶446) by noting that “The simple substance of
Spirit, as consciousness, is divided,” namely between human law and divine law. On the
one hand, there is law as made in the public realm by citizens or rulers, as something
explicit, mediated, and subject to change. On the other hand, there is divine law, which
centers on the family and burial rites, and is something known implicitly and
immediately as unchanging. In the Greek world the human law is a masculine principle,
the divine law feminine. The divine and the human law exist harmoniously until
Creon’s question “And so you dared to transgress these laws,?” she says
Yes, for it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me,
Nor was it She, Justice, who dwells with the gods below,
Who defined these laws for human beings;
Nor did I think that such strength was in your
Proclamations, you being mortal, as to be able to
Prevail over the unwritten and steadfast lawful conventions of the gods!
For not as something contemporary or of yesterday, but as everlasting
Do these live, and no one knows from where they appeared.
(Antigone lines 449-457) 6
For Hegel, the play is a tragedy because neither Creon or Antigone are “right.” In a way,
both are, because human and divine law are integral parts of the Greek Spirit, in fact, in a
certain sense, of Spirit generally. In another way, both perspectives are wrong because
The movement of the ethical powers against each other and of the individualities
calling them into life and action have attained their true end only in so far as both
sides suffer the same destruction.
Creon asserts the superiority of the city over the family, only to lose his son and heir;
Antigone asserts the family’s superiority only to die, as her name suggests, childless.
Sophocles’ play thus represents a moment of growing self-awareness within the Greek
In the last paragraph before “Legal Status,” ¶476, Hegel speaks of “this ruin of
the ethical substance,” and concludes with a sentence that suggests why Rome is the
Cited from the translation of Peter Ahrensdorf and Thomas Pangle in The Theban Plays (Ithaca,
6
family members? The formal universality of law sidesteps this question altogether: as
“persons,” we are all subjects of the law, no matter how we “identify” as individuals.
The Latin etymology of “Person,” which derives from the word for an actor’s mask, is
revealing: in the world of legal status, what matters is not the substance of who we are,
what is under the mask, but our “role,” our rights and obligations under a system of rules.
Hegel’s judgment of this new Roman world is harsh. He begins his discussion of
The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and
substance withdraws is the soulless (geistlose) community which has ceased to be
the substance—itself unconscious—of individuals, and in which they now have
the value of selves and substances, each possessing a separate being-for-self. The
universal is split into the atoms of absolutely multiple individuals; this lifeless
(gestorbene, having died) Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as
persons (Personen).
This world is “soulless” and “lifeless” because its rules seem artificial and alien
impositions, a taste of which we all get around April 15, courtesy of the IRS. (Hegel may
have more than Rome in his sights here.) It’s this soulless world that produced, as a
response, Christian interiority, i.e. the notion that we all have souls, a “depth” that
transcends any civic or family identity. Hegel explicitly links the discussion of “Legal
universality because its content is the rigid unyielding self, not the self that is dissolved in
substance.” At the same time, this world is, in its way, an “advance” over Greece (¶479):
Personhood (Persönlichkeit), then, has stepped out of the life of the ethical
substance. It is the independence of consciousness, an independence which has
It’s one thing to be independent or free in thought, as the Stoic asserts; with Roman law
come the beginnings of an actual or embodied independence, one we will come to know
as rights. As we shall see, however, for Hegel our status as “bearers of rights” is hardly
Persons, qua persons, assert “This is mine” about an indifferent, purely “personal” “this.”
Your possessions may show the worst possible taste, but they are still yours. The law, by
protecting property, makes the assertion of “mine”—unlike the illusory because self-
contradictory claim of the Skeptic that all truth is relative, just “my truth”-- “recognized
and actual” (¶480). From Hegel’s description, one is tempted to call personhood an
essentially Hobbesian view of the self, both because of the undetermined nature of the
good that bare “persons” pursue, and because its pursuit being “without lasting result”
recalls the “restless search for power after power ending only in death” that Hobbes says
characterizes the natural state of selves trying to preserve themselves, namely war. As
difference, i.e. of opposition, in the modern Ethical world-- the jostling, competing selves
of the economy are the Hobbesian aspect of society, the domesticated version of his state
of war.
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel treats personhood and the larger question of
“logically.” The first sentence of the “Introduction” reads “The subject-matter of the
philosophical science of right is the Idea of right—the concept of right and its
“Morality,” and “Ethical Life” (Sittlichkeit, from Sitte, customs or habits), the
development of the concept moves from the most abstract or immediate notion of right to
the most concrete and reflective, right as embodied in an actual social world. [Another
way of seeing the book’s three main divisions: a movement from Locke to Kant to
Aristotle]. Following in the path of the distinction between nature and freedom opened
up by Rousseau, and deepened by Kant, “right” for Hegel is not found in nature but is the
result of freedom, of being asserted and developed by human beings. For Hegel,
however, freedom is not just an “ideal,” the will of the Kantian moral agent who acts out
of pure principle or duty rather than natural or physical motives such as desire or fear.
Rather, freedom is something actual, embodied in the various historical worlds produced
The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point
of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance
and destiny, and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world
of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature.
were. In the first sentence of the last section of the Introduction (§33), Hegel says:
In accordance with the stages in the development of the Idea of the will which is
free in and for itself, the will is [to begin with] immediate; its concept is therefore
abstract, as that of personality, and its existence is an immediate external thing;
the sphere of abstract or formal right.
What this means, I hope, will become clearer from what follows. Hegel begins the next
The will which is free in and for itself, as it is in its abstract concept, is in the
determinate condition of immediacy. Accordingly, in contrast with reality, it is its
own negative actuality, whose reference to itself is purely abstract.
Why “negative,” you ask? Take the barest assertion of the self, of the will: “I want an
apple.” By not just wanting an apple, as any other animal might, but saying “I” want it, I
distinguish the “I” from my desires. I am not my desire for the apple, or any other desire
I might have. Freedom begins with an act of selfhood that is a negation or distinction,
namely the distinction between the self and its empirical contents. This bare self, as
“abstract” or contentless, is the same for you as it is for me (and in asserting it, I know it
The universality of this will which is free for itself is formal universality, i.e. the
will’s self-consciousness (but otherwise contentless) and simple reference to itself
in its individuality; to this extent, the subject is a person. It is inherent in
personality that, as this person, I am completely determined in all respects (in my
inner arbitrary will, drive, and desire, as well as in my relation to my immediate
external existence), and that I am finite, yet totally pure self-reference, and thus
know myself in my finitude as infinite, universal, and free…Personality begins
only at that point where the subject has...a consciousness of itself as a completely
abstract ‘I’ in which all concrete limitation and validity are negated and
invalidated.
With this self-awareness, by saying “I,” human beings, as persons, even surpass nature.
As this person, I know myself as free in myself, and I can abstract from
everything…And yet as this person, I am something wholly determinate.
Personality is thus at the same time the sublime and the wholly ordinary; it
contains this unity of the infinite and the utterly finite, of the determinate
boundary and the completely unbounded. The supreme achievement of the person
is to support this contradiction, which nothing in the natural realm contains or
could endure.
turning back upon, itself. What does this reflexivity have to do with “right”? What
Personality contains in general the capacity for right and constitutes the concept
and the (itself abstact) basis of abstract and formal right. The commandment of
right is therefore: be a person and respect others as persons.
It is hard to see how we get to a notion of right, to a commandment, unless we start from
a notion of personhood as legal status, yet this is precisely what Hegel has not done here. 7
A simple thought experiment might help. When I go into my yard, my neighbor’s dog
barks. One might say, he’s defending his yard. The critical point, though, is that he is not
saying it. If he could, he’d be a person. And, as soon as a hypothetical talking dog said
“This is my yard,” in effect saying “I”, he would also have to admit that I am also an “I.”
In other words, in asserting “mine” he has to admit “yours,” as in “That is your yard,”
and stop barking. (Of course, if he could talk, he might dispute exactly where the
7
See Friedrike Schick, “The concept of the person in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Rev. Fac. Direito
UFMG, Belo Horizonte, n. 66, pp. 177 - 200, jan./jun. 2015. Found online (October 2018) at
https://www.direito.ufmg.br/revista/index.php/revista/article/download/1685/1601.
want an apple”—I am asserting an ownership of that desire: it’s my desire. From there,
it’s a very short step to say—it’s my apple—especially if I worked to get it, or as Locke
would say, mixed my labor with it. For Hegel, it’s only really my apple when I sell it—
i.e. when someone else recognizes it as mine by paying for it. The “commandment” of
§36—“be a person and respect others as persons” sounds like a Kantian moral
imperative, but it isn’t. The form of “right” that goes with personhood is purely formal: it
isa bare assertion of rights which contains no positive content or duty beyond respecting
the rights of others. It’s my apple—whether I eat it, or smash it in the street, is up to
me—my right to it leaves me free for various possibilities, free from you. Thus Hegel
says (§38):
With reference to concrete action and to moral and ethical relations, abstract right
is only a possibility as compared with rest of their content, and the determination
of right is therefore only a permission or warrant. For the same reason of its
abstractness, the necessity of this right is limited to the negative—not to violate
personality and what ensues from personality.
The “negative” character of abstract right makes its subject matter clear: property. Don’t
touch! Property is the way that persons—the most elementary form of selfhood—make
Thus, while starting from a different point, and proceeding in a different manner
Philosophy of Right, arrives at the same place: self-atoms asserting their rights. At the
same time, the practice of slavery shows that the Roman version of personhood is, from
the larger perspective of the concept, defective (§40): “But as for what is called the right
of persons in Roman law, it regards a human being as a person only if he enjoys a certain
making only the male head of the family a “person,” and by making his authority over
them a matter of personal rights or ownership, Roman law also distorted the family:
…the content of the right of the so-called right of persons in Roman law is
concerned with family relationships….The right of persons in Roman law is
therefore not the right of the person as such, but no more than the right of the
particular person; it will later be shown that the substantial basis of family
relationships is rather the surrender of personality. (§40)
These things noted, it is still true that there is a profound connection between the
former, personhood appears as a soulless and abstract world, with the death of the Greek
Ethical life; in the latter, personhood, if in a more perfect form, is still in its inherent
embodied in institutions and practices: “Ethical substance…is the actual spirit of a family
The important point here is that, in the ethical world, “civil society” is bounded—both
“below” and “above” as it were—by two other realms which have different principles,
and are inherently more substantial. “Personhood” doesn’t fit neatly into any of the
three, but it seems closest to the “formal universality” of civil society that protects private
property. (This is complicated because Hegel also includes in “civil society” what we
would call the “welfare state,” the government’s moderation of the effects of unfettered
“capitalism” or the pursuit of self-interest). The affinity between the universal notion of
the “person” and economics explains a curious remark of Hegel’s: he says that it is only
in the context of the “system of needs,” the economy, that he will refer to “human
beings.” (PR §190). The implication, I think, is that the family and the state are more
“concrete” realms than civil society. This is particularly true of the family, which is not
made up of mere “human beings” but of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers,
parents and children, brothers and sisters. It is true of the state is well, which is composed
For Hegel, ethical life “begins,” not historically but conceptually, with the family,
because its connections seem immediate or “just there,” facts. Immediacy is inherently an
something “just there.” Immediacy is thus also, as Hegel’s treatment shows, an inherent
aspect or “moment” of ethicality. Hegel says in the Phenomenology (¶460) that the
community’s human law “possesses” “in the divine law its power and authentication:”
by “divine” Hegel means here what Antigone means, law as not made by somebody but
“just there,” a fact, immediate. We have the sense that it is wrong to break a contract,
more so a law, but for Hegel these senses of “wrongness” rest on a more primordial sense
of right and wrong, one that is immediate and unreflective, even unconscious, that lives
in the family. Upon reflection, this immediacy may prove illusory, the family’s form
depending on civic customs such as the incest taboo, spousal monogamy, etc. (This
dependence is what Antigone cannot see). However, one might say that the family’s
to the fact that the family emerges from something that for Hegel is not, strictly speaking,
The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has its determination in the
spirit’s feeling of its own unity, which is love. Thus, the disposition [appropriate
to the family] is to have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity
as essentiality which has being in and for oneself, so that one is present in it not as
an independent person but as a member.
Now, this all sounds very exalted—what could be more “ethical” than knowing
myself as the unity of myself with another? Indeed, such knowledge is the very task of
Spirit, the implicit telos of consciousness itself in its desire to make the “object” its own
by grasping it, com-prehending. Yet, Hegel also says here that “love is a feeling, that is,
ethical life in its natural form, ” which means that strictly speaking, love can only be an
image or prefiguration of the ethical. As he makes clear both here and in the
Phenomenology, in the family love is inherently bound up with nature, such as the
parents’ sexual desires for each other, and their affection for their children. Only
simple example of this dictum: “As a natural father, I am fond of my children. As their
ethical father, I must see that they are properly cared for and educated.” 8
Now, this
might make it seem that Hegel is taking a Kantian position, i.e. that the duty to one’s
children is ethical only in so far as it is motivated purely by the idea of duty as opposed to
critique of this Kantian view. Put simply, that critique has two related strands: the test of
the categorical imperative is too “formal” to generate any specific content, and all action,
8
The Logic of Desire (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007), p. 242.
Kant, in PR §124 Hegel says “it is an empty assertion of the abstract understanding…to
take the view that, in volition, objective and subjective ends are mutually exclusive.” In
this same section, as well as in the Phenomenology (which Hegel cites here in PR), and
in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel is critical of those who,
having the “morality of valets,” (as in the saying, “no man is a hero to his valet de
chambre”) would deprecate the actions of great men as unheroic because impure,
custom or habits (Sitte), but not simply transcended. As Robert Pippin has pointed out,
unlike for Kant, for Hegel spirit or freedom is not a different order of causality than
nature, but rather a mode of self-relation, via a purposive taking up of, a reflective stance
towards, nature. Pace Kant, for Hegel practical reason is inherently impure, which is
10
why in developing the concept of Right, the Philosophy of Right moves from “Morality”
to “Ethical Life.” For Hegel, feeling is as it were only the “matter” of action or our
connections with each other; ethicality or spirit gives this matter form or principle. This
9
PhG ¶665 with Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, pp. 31-2.
10
Robert Pippin, “Naturalness and Mindedness,” European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), pp.
194-212. See esp. p. 207: “Kant’s dualism may not be metaphysical but it is strict; the realms of nature and
spirit are either/or, never both/and, while for Hegel, spirit is, as we shall see, a kind of achievement which
some natural beings are capable of, and so there can be a continuity between natural and spiritual
dimensions.” Pippin points out (pp. 198-9) that, for Hegel, a proto-form of Spirit is present in other
animals: “In the Encyclopaedia passages that describe the ‘transition’ [between nature and spirit], Hegel’s
position is that some sentient creatures do not merely embody their natures, in the way a stone or planet or
an insect might be said simply to be what it is. Some come to be in some sort of relation to their
immediately felt or experienced dispositions, sensations and inclinations…Such creatures do not, say, just
register threatening stimuli; they experience what is taken to be a threat, take up the threat ‘in a way’,
fearfully, feelingly. Feelings thus in Hegel’s language are said to be ‘modes of negativity’ – or non-
identity: a mode of self-relation within an experience, not merely (although certainly also) being in a
state…Soul [as in Aristotle, the principle of all animal life] is said by Hegel to be what it is in its
‘sublation’ of (cancelling the independence of while yet preserving) nature, not in ‘being’ other than
nature.”
image or form, similar to the Greek eidos (see PR §20 with §151, 187). 11
Locutions such as “ethical immediacy” or “ethical life in its natural form” might
seem merely self-contradictory, but they are not, or rather they are more than that: they
are paradoxical. As Rousseau answered those who accused him of self-contradiction, the
contraction is “not in me, but in things.” [cite?] For Hegel, the ‘understanding’ (Verstand)
may balk, but ‘reason’ (Vernunft) or “speculation” can grasp unity within contradiction,
§161):
The translator, H. Nisbet, notes here “In this context of marriage and the family, the word
Gattung (genus, species) carries with it strong overtones of the closely related word
11
From Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology, however, one might have the
impression that his view shades ultimately into Kant’s. Since “the ethical is intrinsically universal,” (¶451),
the only ethicality that belongs solely to the family is the duty of burial, a duty towards all of its members.
Burial is a “spiritual” act because it asserts and preserves an individuality by protecting the body from the
ravages of nature, i.e. from becoming mere indifferent food for birds and dogs, “at the mercy of every
lower irrational individuality.” (¶452). Through this act, the individual becomes, in the family’s memory,
a daimon, a protective spirit. Hegel says “this last duty thus constitutes the perfect divine law…every other
relationship…which does not remain simply one of love but is ethical belongs to human law…” (¶453).
For example, the duty to provide for one’s wife and children is enforced by human, civic, ordinance. For
her opposing a spiritual act, burial, to nature, and because, allegedly, siblings “do not desire each other,”
Antigone is for Hegel the paradigm of the family’s ethicality. However, despite her love for Polyneices not
being tinged with “desire,” she is not a Kantian moral agent: she does not act from the dictates of “pure
practical reason.” On the contrary: “the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive
awareness of what is ethical.” (¶457; Hegel’s italics). Moreover, she doesn’t risk death by insisting that all
of the unburied, other women’s brothers, be buried—she asserts no duty to them. She buries her brother,
whose individual loss is “irreparable” (¶473; Hegel cites here Antigone ln. 910). She is very much in the
realm of immediacy, of feeling, of particularity—although one might also say that with her, and in the
divine law, that realm—the family—surpasses itself (the etymology of her name—“against generation”—
suggests as much). Indeed Spirit is self-surpassing, the self-surpassing of nature by culture’s formative
power.
human beings reproduce sexually, they never would have come up with the ethical form
that is marriage. That’s not the end of the story, however. §161 continues:
But, secondly, in self-consciousness, the union of the natural sexes, which was
merely inward (or had being in itself) and whose existence was for this reason
merely external, is transformed into a spiritual union, into self-conscious love.
This looks like, but is not, romanticism. Hegel merely argues that, once humans no longer
just have desires, but become selves aware of having desires because aware of other
selves, the nature and object of desire changes. Human lovers look into each other’s
eyes; unlike animals, they desire to be desired. Hegel here follows Rousseau: the
acquisition of self-consciousness means that the road back to simple animality is forever
blocked. Viewed from the perspective of the self, desire as purely animal is “merely
external.”
What Hegel calls the “immediate concept” (§160) of the family’s ethicality,
marriage, seems to emerge from a space somewhere between desire and contract (§162):
The subjective origin of marriage may lie to a greater extent in the particular
inclination of the two persons who enter this relationship, or in the foresight and
initiative of parents, etc. But its objective origin is the free consent of the persons
concerned, and in particular their consent to constitute a single person and to give
up their individual personalities within this union. In this respect, their union is a
self-limitation, but since they attain their substantial self-consciousness within it,
it is in fact their liberation.
Three points bear fleshing out. First, the contrast here between subjective and objective
recalls that between subject and substance; Hegel says here that as an “objective
determination,” marriage is an “ethical duty, ” but that aspect coexists with its subjective
aspect. More pointedly, Hegel makes it clear that “ethical” or spiritual does not mean
separate from the sexual; those who understand these as separate are limited by a
views the moment of natural life [Lebendigkeit, lit. livingness] as “utterly negative.”
(§163). Marriage is the result of this combination of subjective and objective, a (§163)
“consciousness of this union as a substantial end, and hence in love, trust, and the sharing
Secondly, the contrast between the subjective and objective side of marriage is,
as it were, recapitulated within the subjective or “external” side, where, it seems, Hegel
tries to find a middle. At one “extreme,” that of a low “level of development [Bildung] of
reflective thought,” marriages were arranged. But, “At the other extreme, it is the mutual
inclination of the two persons.” In the “Addition” to §162, this contrast of “extremes” is
sharpened:
Among those peoples who hold the female sex in little respect, the parents arrange
marriages arbitrarily, without consulting the individuals concerned; the latter
accept this arrangement, since the particularity of feeling [Empfindung] makes no
claims for itself as yet…In modern times, on the other hand, the subjective origin
[of marriage], the “state of being in love” is regarded as the only important factor.
Here, it is imagined that each must wait until his hour has struck, and that one can
only give one’s love only to a specific individual.
Hegel’s tone here shows his typical ambivalence about “modern times,” as does this
remark in the body of §162, which highlights Hegel’s concern about the problematic
But in those modern dramas and other artistic presentations in which love
between the sexes is the basic interest, we encounter a pervasive element of
frostiness which is brought into the heat of passion such works portray by the total
contingency associated with it. For the whole interest is represented as resting
solely upon these particular individuals. This may well be of infinite importance
for them, but it is of no such importance in itself.
What does Hegel mean by “contingency”? Harry might never have met Sally.
pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. This concern about the contemporary
primacy given to love and feeling shows up in his remarks about divorce in the Addition
to §163:
For Hegel, divorce should be hard; to dissolve a union that is Sittlich, ethical, the fact that
“we are no longer in love” should not suffice (and until recently, it didn’t). The
“objective” side of marriage is also the reason it is traditionally held in a church, but this
We are now mostly unsure about why marriage is held in a church, and often use words
such as “commitment” when speaking its basis, both signs of the advance of
Persönlichkeit.
Third, the phrase “free consent of the persons involved” makes it sound like
Hegel views marriage is a contract—and it is, but of a most peculiar kind, one that
For the precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract—
i.e. that of individual personality as a self-sufficient unit—in order to supersede it
[ihn aufzuheben]. That identification of personalities whereby the family is a
single person and its members are its accidents...is the ethical spirit.
By “crude,” Hegel refers to Kant’s notorious view that marriage is a contract giving the
parties the use and enjoyment of each other’s sexual organs. Sentimentalism, however, is
A third and equally unacceptable notion is that which equates marriage with love;
for love, as a feeling, is open in all respects to contingency, and this is a shape
which the ethical may not assume.
For Hegel, one key (and now controversial) aspect of marriage that makes it
substantial—more than a contract between a party of the first part, and a party of the
second part—is that it is, as a whole rather than a mere aggregate, internally
substantial unity depends, for Hegel, on a third thing: the issue of a child (§173,
addition). However, for Hegel, what we now call “gender” is far from being a simple
natural fact: it is part of spirit. As we saw in the section on “True Spirit” in the
Phenomenology:
What does this last obscure sentence mean? What is this assigning (zuteilen), and what is
its basis, “according to its essence”? The subsequent discussion makes some of this a
little more clear: the assignment is gender. When the young man leaves the family, the
He passes from the divine law, in whose sphere he had lived, over to the human
law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and
the guardian of the divine law. In this way, the two sexes overcome their [merely]
natural being and appear in their ethical significance, as diverse beings who share
between them the two distinctions belonging to the ethical substance. These two
universal beings of the ethical world have, therefore, their specific individuality in
naturally distinct self-consciousnesses…the ethical Spirit is the immediate unity
of the substance with self-consciousness—an immediacy which appears,
therefore, both from the side of reality, and of difference, as the existence of a
natural difference.
last sentence, and argue that what Hegel means by “nature” and “natural difference” are
their mistaken view that their relations are based on some immediate available truth. This
view, while having some truth, and consistent with contemporary sensibilities, sidesteps
too neatly a very vexed question: how Hegel understands the status of nature. 12
Erscheinen, appearance, is not scheinen, mere deceptive seeming; the phenomena of the
Phenomenology are appearances (from φαινω, appear), one sided to be sure, of the truth.
difference, oversimplifies: “This moment loses both the indeterminateness which it still
had there, and the contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities.” (¶459). Still, retail is
See the critical remarks about Robert Pippin’s claim (op. cit., p. 204) that in Hegel there is “no
12
missing ontology” [of nature] in Raoni Padui, From the Transcendental to the Ontological: Hegel,
Heidegger, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2012), pp. 224-5.
are by nature, where there is a “contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities,” for
Hegel they are still by nature, on the whole, different. While “nature” appears
of something. Times change, but nature persists as the “matter” somehow conditioning
Thus, for Hegel, it seems that nature or sex has as it were a continuing
gravitational pull on the differences that Spirit posits within itself, namely gender. In
maintaining the mysterious persistence of nature, he is its public enemy number one. The
persistence of nature is implicit in how closely the conceptual treatment of the family in
13
This claim, about the persistence of nature in conditioning spirit, admittedly, seems to contradict
the central claim of Hegel’s Science of Logic, that the Concept, as self-grounding, gets its content entirely
from itself. See the discussion in Padui, op. cit., pp. 224-37, especially pp. 234: “The coherence of this
account relies on understanding the development of nature into the realm of freedom as nature’s own self-
overcoming, and it is this aspect that is most difficult to fully comprehend, let alone accept. The self-
determination present within the sphere of Geist can only be absolute if it can somehow ‘shed’ its
conditionality vis-à-vis its natural conditions, as Hegel himself saw extremely clearly.” The position I am
attributing to Hegel here is closer to what Padui identifies as Schelling’s critique of Hegel, wherein
Schelling insists, contra Hegel, on nature’s “pre-categorical” or “noumenal” reality (Padui, p. 237), as a
reality prior to Spirit. In the phrase quoted above, “the indeterminateness which it still had there” in PhG
¶459 refers, I would surmise, to nature in this pre-categorical sense.
However, it seems to me, that by referring to an “absolute” “self-determination within the sphere
of Geist,” Padui mistakes the relation between the Logic and the Phenomenology, between the eternal
movement of the Concept depicted in the former, and the necessarily time-bound nature of Spirit depicted
in the latter. Even though, as the Phenomenology attempts to show, that it is only in the “last” stage of
Spirit, that of Hegel’s own time, that philosophy can become sophia (see PhG, Preface, esp. ¶‘s 5, 19, 37),
and the philosopher achieve “absolute knowing” or “science,” still: absolute knowing is a thinking of
thinking which is also a thinking of being and is identical to what the Logic poetically and somewhat
misleadingly (if taken literally) calls “God as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature and
of a finite spirit” –this thinking is not, strictly speaking, a human thinking or a form of Geist. See the
discussion in pp. 423-51 in Kalkavage, Logic of Desire, cited supra, as well as Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and
Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology, translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston Illinois:
Northwestern U.P., 1974), pp. 581ff, esp. the quote from the Logic on p. 582. Thus, the “ethical” is not
part of the Concept’s self-motion: God’s thinking, the Logic, is beyond Good and Evil. As not embodied, it
is not conditioned by nature or the basis of an actual social world. Hegel thus preserves the Platonic-
Aristotelian priority of theory to practice. However, there is still a problem: if nature is the “other” of the
Concept, the divine Logos, then, in order to be truly “other,” nature would have to be not totally
comprehended by the Logos: contrary to Hegel’s explicit teaching: the real is not “absolutely” rational.
Phenomenology. In the former, Hegel cites the latter explicitly (§166). The difference
between the husband and wife in the Philosophy of Right is not identical with the tragic
antithesis between Creon and Antigone. But: the modern difference is not totally different
from ancient difference: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Here is how Hegel
sets out what are now called the “roles” of man and woman in the family (§166):
Man therefore has his actual substantial life in the state, in science, etc., and
otherwise in work and struggle with external world and with himself, so that it is
only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity with
himself. In the family, he has a peaceful intuition of this unity, and an emotive
and subjective ethical life. Woman, however, has her substantial vocation in the
family, and her ethical disposition consists in this [family] piety.
This description seems now both like ancient history and only yesterday; how much of
this, too, will pass is the question of the hour. Hegel in effect places the entire burden of
there even being a sphere of ethical immediacy distinct from civil society entirely upon
women. Without Penelope’s fidelity, Odysseus would have no home to which to return.
“persons” that characterize civil society, the state—the third division of “Ethical Life—is
the ceiling, Sittlichkeit’s architechtonic principle and guiding end. What Hegel means
by the state is a huge topic; I limit myself to a few brief remarks. First, contra Locke, for
Hegel the state should not be understood as a contract made between individuals in a
“state of nature” for the securing of their rights against each other (§77; cf. §187, 194).
A “state of nature” does not and cannot exist because the individual is “already by nature
a citizen” (§77, addition). Put more precisely, “individuality” as a reality depends upon a
certain kind of political order, namely a modern one, in which state and society are
Secondly, the state’s higher unity, which encompasses the moments of immediate
unity (the family) and difference (civil society, the “economy”) is not, for Hegel, based
upon feeling, love, or any “family-like” notion such as common descent or ethnicity. The
state, for Hegel, has a rational basis. To be affirmed, it must be understood, which is why
Hegel thinks that most people will find themselves not in it, but in the family, their
profession, and/or in religion (see §§201, 255, 270). The constitution and the laws are the
whole, or spirit.
Thirdly, the state for Hegel is necessarily one of many states. On the question of
Hegel rejects cosmopolitanism, the view that “I am a citizen of the world,” because the
particularity. But, Hegel goes further than that, maintaining that “war should not be
14
Strictly speaking, ‘individuality’. See §259, addition: “The state as actual is essentially an
14
individual state, and beyond that a particular state. Individuality should be distinguished from particularity;
praise of war forms part of his critique of classical liberal social contract theory (§324):
In his remarks on war in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel develops a thought that he
tendencies of civil society, but what does Hegel think is “ethical” about that? It turns out
that for Hegel what gives war an “ethical” aspect is the sacrifice of life and property
which war requires. These goods, as “finite” and “transient” are contingent, subject to
necessity, to nature. “But,” Hegel claims (§324), “in the ethical essence (i.e. the state)
War is that condition in which the vanity of temporal things and temporal
goods—which tends at other times to be merely a pious phrase—takes on serious
significance, and it is accordingly the moment in which the ideality of the
particular attains its right and becomes actuality. The higher significance of war is
it is a moment within the very Idea of the State, whereas particularity belongs to history.” There is no
logical derivation of a particular national character, such as Frenchness.
Here, Hegel also argues that in a condition of peace, the “particularities” of civil society
become “rigid and ossified.” War is in effect part of the “life cycle” of the body politic,
occasionally necessary for it to be a body at all: “the unity of the body is essential to the
health, and if its parts grow internally hard, the result is death.”
office and its furnishings dissolve, and a man, in silhouette, falls between the concrete
the theme of the show. Not only is the identity of the main protagonist, Donald Draper,
based on a lie; in almost all of the marriages depicted, infidelity and divorce are rampant,
as self-atoms fly off on their centrifugal paths to go bump in the night. The show is set in
the advertising world of the 1960’s, but its popularity suggests that it hits a contemporary
nerve. This current sense of a lack of substance is hardly confined to the United States.
One sees it, for example, in the works of the French novelist Michel Houellebeq, whose
“elementary particles” are, likewise, descendants of the same atomicity that Hegel found
in ancient Rome. Given how far we are from the vision of Sittlichkeit Hegel lays out in
It might, however, be a very instructive failure. In the past, Hegel was often
Marxism and fascism. Contemporary scholars now see Hegel as a man of the center, a
friendly corrector of liberalism, not its enemy. Yet, we seem to living in a time where, as
Yeats put it in “The Second Coming,” the “center cannot hold.” At the moment, the
politics of the United States and other western countries seems to be caught, once again,
prove useful in identifying just who the two main parties are. In section 125 of the Gay
Science, Nietzsche announces, through the mad man, the death of God. What we in the
West are seeing today—and perhaps have been seeing ever since World War I-- is the
death of Hegel, where the two sides of the political world divide up the body between
them.
For those left of center, what is most congenial in Hegel are the regulatory and
welfare aspects of his state over civil society (PR §§240-245). Poverty, Hegel notes, is a
particularly intractable problem in modern society, the unfortunate result of the workings
should be regarded as all the more perfect” (§242) to the degree that the alleviation of
poverty is not left to individual charity but becomes a matter of state concern. Where
today’s left parts company with Hegel are issues of family, gender, and marriage on the
one hand, and nationalism and war on the other. What unites these positions is a
rejection of the confines in which Hegel had placed “personhood.” Thus, changing a
and a woman, but between two persons. Similarly, in recent protests against
immigration restrictions and enforcement, one hears the rubric “no human being is
illegal.” All are persons. Taken to its logical conclusion, such an idea would require the
elimination of the nation-state—a goal which, in its way, the E.U. has been pursing.
In politics, as in physics, Newton’s third law of motion holds: for every activist,
there is an equal and opposite reactionary. The contemporary right looks, unsurprisingly,
like a photographic negative of the left. Civil society, or the economy, is where many on
the right insist on the rights of abstract personhood (including those of fictitious or legal
persons, namely corporations): they are impatient with taxation, redistribution, and
regulation. As far as questions of the family, marriage, and gender, the situation with
respect to “personhood” is the opposite. True, few on the right would go as far as Hegel
does and relegate women to the private sphere. At the same time, these citizens—about
one half of the country-- are not exactly happy warriors in the battle against the enemy
named by their liberal brethren: “gender stereotypes,” along with its evil siblings
feel that not all the old understandings and definitions of man and woman should be
junked; it’s as if, resisting the tide, they whisper to each other “Vive la différance!”
To this persistent muttering and foot dragging, those on the other side of the fence
shout back that this allegedly essential dichotomy of man and woman is “socially
hence uphold a “hierarchy.” All essentialism is, essentially, bad. On the issue of gender,
often elect onerous medical procedures to give themselves the body that corresponds,
whatever that might mean, to their gender “identity.” Gender in this case is not fluid or
“insubstantial” at all but a cold hard fact, one that is extremely personal—a fact that
demands, in some cases, corrective medical action. The antinomy between left and right
but does not resolve, both opposites. To the old feminist rallying cry “biology is not
destiny,” there appears to be an addendum: the destiny can be fulfilled only in so far as
the biology can be changed. Persons should be free to choose their gender, people say,
but this claim leaves the basis of freedom unclear: are we free because as persons we are
determined, we have to express what we are? For Hegel, as we have seen, “personhood”
as such mysteriously contains this duality. “Person” is at once the most universal and
public, and particular and private, of attributes. We assert our rights saying “I am a
person too!” and refuse to answer questions saying “that’s personal.” As persons, we
should be complete, wholes, like individually wrapped Kraft singles. It’s been nearly
half a century since some feminist proclaimed that “A woman without a man is like a fish
without a bicycle.” Yet, when Harry finally comes together with Sally, there’s hardly a
difference between left and right on personhood really becomes clear and distinct. In
accord with Hegel’s critique of cosmopolitanism, those on the right are unapologetic in
maintaining that America should pursue its national self-interest, even as neo and paleo
cons go at each other’s throats in arguing about how to do so. In some cases, true, such
“nationalism” slides into an ethnic or racial nationalism, going beyond the rational or
strictly political confines in which Hegel had placed the state’s self-assertion. The recent
fracas about a “crisis at the border” makes the continental divide manifest. Is the crisis
primarily a “humanitarian” crisis—too many people without adequate food and medical
attention—or is the fundamental problem that too many people, including a small
percentage but significant number of really bad people, are entering the country without
permission? You can choose your media outlet, because the media no longer mediates.
In the cacophony of the parties—of the parts—one wonders, where is the whole?
Is there a whole, a unum e pluribus? Can a center be found? Or are we headed back to
factions and isolated atoms? Hegel, if not answering these questions, helps us think
still ours.